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DeductionTraQ Organizes Donations to Charity

From , former About.com Guide

DeductionTraQ organizes tax deductible charitable donations.

DeductionTraQ Fair Market Value Lookup - Screen shot by Shelley Elmblad

Copyright 2007 DeductionTraQ LLC. All rights reserved.
Online Tax Deduction Tracking Software:
DeductionTraQ is online tax deduction tracking software with a free, standard membership and a $14.95/year premier membership. Both memberships upload scanned receipts and digital photos to document non-cash donations.
Find Fair Market Value of Non-Cash Donations to Charity:
DeductionTraQ Premier looks up the fair market value of up to 100 noncash donations (you can buy more FMVLookUp Credits) using market data from eBay and other leading industry data feeds. The premier membership also provides printable Tax Form 8283 and three types of donation reports.
Tax Deductions Help:
Click on the Help button in DeductionTraQ to get more information about the part of the software currently being used. Click on Help on the DeductionTraQ Summary screen to get links to IRS publications to get more information for entering tax deductible contributions.
DeductionTraQ Overview:
Setting Up and Using DeductionTraQ
DeductionTraQ is easy to set up and use, although the interface is not quite as intuitive as TurboTax ItsDeductible Online or TaxCut DeductionPro. For example, to look up values, the donation item details are entered and saved, then fair market values are looked up, a value is selected and then saved. Depending on your display resolution, you must scroll down to see the Fair Market Value Lookup tool.

DeductionTraQ uploaded images slowly for me at times, however, the slowdown was quite tolerable given the affordable cost of DeductionTraQ.

DeductionTraQ Standard
DeductionTraQ Standard gives a way to organize charitable donations, but does not offer printable reports or the fair market value of items donated to charity (the service DeductionTraQ is charging for). DeductionTraQ Standard does not give the user any idea of the much-improved experience of the premier version, and it provides inadequate tools for most people who need to track charitable contributions.

DeductionTraQ Premier
The DeductionTraQ Premier membership, however, is nicely priced at $14.95 per year and combines fair market value look up with digital images to back up tax deductions for charitable donations. The only drawback is that there appears to be no way to export data from DeductionTraQ to tax software, so donations need to be entered into tax preparation software manually. TurboTax and TaxCut users can use TurboTax ItsDeductible Online or TaxCut DeductionPro to track and then export data to their tax software, but neither associate charitable donation data with photo or receipt images.

Visit DeductionTraQ web site

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